The preface to this, the second edition, is short, and terminates with these words:

"I know not that I can add any thing material on the subject of this last revisal, unless it be proper to give the reason why the Iliad, though greatly altered, has undergone much fewer alterations than the Odyssey. The true reason, I believe, is this: the Iliad demanded my utmost possible exertions; it seemed to meet me like an ascent almost perpendicular, which could not be surmounted at less cost than all the labour that I could bestow on it. The Odyssey, on the contrary, seemed to resemble an open and level country, through which I might travel at my ease. The latter, therefore, betrayed me into some negligence, which, though little conscious of it at the time, on an accurate search, I found had left many disagreeable effects behind it. I now leave the work to its fate. Another may labour hereafter, in an attempt of the same kind, with more success, but more industriously, I believe, none ever will.”

Homer's poems were first collected together at Athens, by the order of Pisistratus, and digested into books, called Rhapsodies.They were previously sung, in a detached manner, by itinerant bards,* * with other pieces of their own composition. Of these Pado, or Rhapsodists, who in a great measure partook of the nature of the Scandinavian Scalds, Druids, and Saxon Minstrels, the author of the Iliad was originally one, and obtained, it is probable, a more pitiful subsistence, in his travels from town to town, than those who came after him. Thus treated while alive, the celebrated poet no sooner breathes his last, than

Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenæ,
Orbis de patriâ certat, Homere, tuâ.

On which circumstance this neat epigram is founded:

Sev'n famous towns contend for Homer dead,

Through which the living Homer begg'd his bread.

"In the year 1488," says Mr. Roscoe, vol 2, p. 71 of the Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, " Demetrius Chalcondyles, and Demetrius Cretensis, published at Florence the first edition of the works of Homer, which is inscribed to Piero de' Medici, the son of Lorenzo." They have since been printed, in numerous modes of utility and elegance, in Germany, France, and England. Versions of

*Cuper, says Chambers, informs us that the rhapsodists were cloathed in red when they sung the Iliad, and in blue when they sung the Odyssey.

+ The Clarendon press has recently sent forth the most superb and correct edition of the Iliad and Odyssey that has, perhaps, ever been produced in this or any other country. The beauty of the work, it should, however, be observed, is confined to the large paper copies, those in the diminutive quarto being (if we may use the poet's language) "shorn of their beams," by a very tasteless and

the Greek are abundant: Italy, France, and England have long possessed them, and Germany, though it could before only boast of imperfect attempts, can now exhibit a complete translation of both the Ilad and the Odyssey, in German hexameter verse, by Johann Heinrich Voss, which, for spitit, is reported to be equal to any, and for correctness superior to all.

Coming at length to our own translators, we find that the battle is principally between Pope and Cowper,* who form the two great bodies of the troops that have entered the field, and though we may occasionally notice the indirect skirmishes of others in the common attack, yet our chief attention must be directed to their more important evolutions and achievements. We shall now proceed to review the translation of our poet, on which we shall not dwell as it. may please ourselves, but as long as we think it likely not to prove tedious to our readers.

The Iliad, whose subject is the anger of Achilles, and its direful consequence to the Grecian army, first claims our regard; and here we behold of twy Tomtwr agi5ost in his meridian splendour. In our selections, we shall not be guided by a wish to expose the liberties Pope has taken with his author, or to produce any remarkable beauties of translation either in him or Cowper, but by the desire of bringing forward several of those divine passages that abound in the Iliad, Bright and numberless as the stars in heaven.

miserable deprivation of margin. It must, also, not be passed over in silence, that, although this Homer was printed at Oxford in 1801, it is indebted, for its distinguished accuracy, to the powerful assistance and erudite acumen of Mr. Porson, the truly profound and every way accomplished professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge. If the Oxonians have, in this instance, betrayed something like a poverty of learning or diligence amongst their scholars, it is but just to confess that they have exhibited, in their election of Mr. Porson, Græcorum longé doctissimus, to perform the task, a degree of judgment that does them no inconsiderable honour. The best copies of the work are embellished with two fine heads of the illustrious bard, and we also perceive a very needless engraving of a pillar on which are hung the arms of the Grenville family, who patronized the undertaking. It is therefore, perhaps, by the booksellers, called the Gren ville Homer, but we think it would have been wiser, and "more germane to the matter," to have dignified it with the name of its enlightened editor.

*The English Homers of Chapman, Hobbes, and Ogilby, we purposely avoid noticing, because we could not justly advert to them without extending our review to a very irksome and inordinate length. How much Pope was indebted to these, as well as to the poetical translation of Eobanus Hessus, and the French versions of La Valterie and Dacier, is well known to the republic. Cowper, also, owes some obligation to Chapman.

↑ Origines contra Celsum. L. 7. -

In the sixth book we are presented with that exquisite and af fecting scene in which Hector embraces his infant son Astyánax, and takes leave of Andromache, who uses all her eloquence to prevail on him to shun the fight....

To whom majestic Hector thus replied:

Thy eares are all mine also. But I dread
The matron's scorn, the brave man's just disdain,

Should fear seduce me to desert the field.

No, my Andromache! my fearless heart

Me rather urges into foremost fight,
Studious of Priam's glory and my own.
For my prophetic soul foresees a day
When Ilium; Ilium's people; and, himself,
Her warlike king, shall perish. But no grief
For Ilium; for her people; for the king,
My warlike sire; nor even for the queen ;
Nor for the num'rous and the valiant band
My brothers, destined, all, to bite the ground,
So moves me, as my grief for thee alone,
Doom'd, then, to follow some imperious Greek,
A weeping captive, to the distant shores
Of Argos; there to labour at the loom
For a task-mistress, and with many a sigh,
But heav'd in vain, to bear the pondrous urn
From Hypereia's or Messeïs fount.

Fast flow thy tears the while, and as he eyes

That silent shower, some passing Greek shall say--

"This was the wife of Hector, who excell'd
"All Troy in fight when Ilium was besieged."
While thus he speaks, thy tears shall flow afresh,
The guardian of thy freedom while he lived

For ever lost; but be my bones inhum'd

A senseless store, or e'er thy parting cries
Shall pierce mine ear, and thou be dragg'd away.

COWPER.

If the Greek were not so long we should transcribe it, and the reader would then readily perceive that Cowper has translated the poet with great fidelity. We shall now give the version of Pope, which happens to be, perhaps, the most favourable of any portion that could be quoted from him. Such glaring interpolations as have crept in, we shall distinguish by Italics; the minor embellishments will appear from a comparison with the preceding.

The chief replied: That post shall be my care;

Not that alone, but all the works of war.

How would the sons of Troy, in arins renown'd,
And Troy's proad dames, whose garments sweep the ground,

:

my

Attaint the lustre of former name,
Should Hector basely quit the field of fame?
My early youth was bred to martial pains,
My soul impels me to th' embattled plains:
Let me be foremost to defend the throne,
And guard my father's glories, and my own.

Yet come it will, the day decreed by fates:
(How my heart trembles while my tongue relates !)
The day when thou, imperial Troy! must bend,
And see thy warriors fall, thy glories end.
And yet no dire presage so wounds my mind,
My mother's death, the ruin of my kind,
Not Priam's hoary hairs, defil'd with gore,
Not all my brothers, gasping on the shore,
As thine, Andromache! thy griefs I dread;
I see thee, trembling, weeping, captive led!
In Argive looms our battles to design,

And woes, of which so large a part was thine!
To bear the victor's hard commands, or bring
The weight of waters from Hyperia's spring.
There, while you groan beneath the load of life,
They cry, behold the mighty Hector's wife.
Some haughty Greek, who lives thy tears to see
Embitters all thy woes by naming me.
The thoughts of glory past, and present shame
A thousand griefs shall waken at the name!
May I lie cold before that dreadful day,
Press'd with a load of monumental clay !

Thy Hector, wrapt in everlasting sleep,

Shall neither hear thee sigh, nor see thee weep.

In Homer we have no such thing as

POPE.

My early youth was bred to martial pains ;

but we find something like it in Dryden's translation of this passage: Early in rugged arms I took delight.

So this idea,

In Argive looms our battles to design,

And woes, of which so great a part was thine! which is pretty enough, may be traced to Dryden's A spectacle in Argos, at the loom,

Gracing with Trojan fights a Grecian room;

adding Virgil's quorum pars magna fui, in Homer, who has simply these wrods:

but can never be found

wgos aλans 1500 upxivois,

faithfully translated by Cowper, but very negligently by Doctor

Johnson:

When some proud Grecian dame shall tasks impose,

In turning the whole of the passage already cited, Johnson, avoiding, probably, Dryden's error of giving too much, has fallen into the other extreme of giving too little. Neither of them has done the poet justice.-The

Χητεί τοι δ' ανδρα, αμύνειν δέλιον ημαρ V. 463.

is not discoverable in Pope; and the σe d'éλandolo is alone preserved by Cowper.

After this speech (for we cannot yet leave this delightful scene) Hector puts forth his hands

To reach his boy; but with a scream the child
Still closer to his nurse's bosom clung,
Shunning his touch; for dreadful in his eyes
The brazen armour shone, and dreadful more
The shaggy crest that swept his father's brow.

COWPER.

Placing his "beaming helmet" on the ground, and fondling the boy in his arms, he offers up a prayer to Jove and all the gods, beseeching that he may "far excel his sire," and by his glorious, deeds rejoice his mother's heart—

If the reader will read this passage without the Italics, omitting three lines out of the six, he will find it come very near the original. Every thing that could be done for the Aanguos yṛhaσaσα, seems to have been done, but there is a delicacy about the expression, as in the λλw σway of Anacreon, which is inimitable in our language.

We must here take notice of the arts to which Pope is often obliged to have recourse, in consequence of composing in rhyme. In the first line of what has just appeared, the words

-fondly gazing on her charms,